Setting your goals for the year
Welcome to the New Year 2002! There is no
better time than at the beginning of a new year to sit down and
define your operating goals for the next 12 months. As stated
in the book, The Managing of Organizations by Bertram Gross, “All
members of an organization have some idea – however fuzzy
or mistaken it may be – of what is expected from them.”
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You need to drill down deeper than that by
asking the following questions:
Customer satisfaction
• Who are your customers?
• What needs are you going to
fill?
Processing characteristics:
• What are the specific
activities to be performed?
• Where, when, how fast and for
how long?
• What other conditions exist?
Processes
• Methods to be used?
• What sequence of actions?
Input Factors:
• How much incoming work?
• What are the manpower
requirements?
• What are the equipment and
facility needs?
By forcing yourself to write down the
answers to these questions, you will discover the power of
planning and the necessity of clearly communicating to your
employees what is expected from them.
Who are your customers?
The first, and most important question is
Who are your customers? The answer to this question will drive
the answers to the other questions.
The drycleaning industry has three basic
customer types:
1. The consistent customer.
2. The coupon clipper.
3. The two weddings and a funeral
customer.
The most successful drycleaners I know are
the ones who cater to the consistent customer group. My
definition of “most successful” is “the
owners who maximize their return on investment and their return
on sales with the least amount of risk and the least amount of
effort.”
The drycleaners who cater to the price
conscious customers can do well financially but the dues are
high. Lower prices mean that you need a larger piece volume. As
everyone knows, in this industry it is one piece at a time. If
the customer isn’t paying, then the owner is paying with
lower returns and longer hours — or the employees are
paying with low wages and no benefits.
The third type of customer is the person
who visits a drycleaner two or three times a year out of
necessity. These customers are important to your business, but
for planning purposes they are incidental customers.
Once again, the answer to the second
question (What needs are you going to fill?) is driven by your
answer to the first.
If you are serving the consistent
drycleaning customer, then you are catering to the people who
are more concerned with the quality of your service and work.
These customers are less concerned with the prices you charge.
A side note about pricing: it was reported
in a recent Wall Street Journal article that Hertz car rentals
are down 25 percent. This drop in volume is directly related to
fewer people flying.
So, what has Hertz done? Did they lower
their prices? No. As a matter of fact, they increased their
weekly rates an average of 26 percent. Other car rental
companies also raised prices. As of this writing, Enterprise
Rent-A-Car was the only major car rental company not to
increase its prices.
The next category is the “process”
you are using. In the drycleaning industry, the process refers
to your primary method of cleaning. Therefore, unless you are
in the market for a new solvent, that question has been
answered. The process is either perc, petroleum, wetcleaning or
one of the new alternative solvents on the market.
Evaluate your processes
When reviewing your processes, you must
evaluate the sequence of actions. Some drycleaners inspect and
spot garments before drycleaning. Others inspect and spot after
drycleaning. All use one of these two sequences: pre-spot or
post-spot.
To test how well your particular sequence
is working, go into your plant and inspect 100 garments for
stains — before the garments are pressed. If your plant
operates the way most do, you will find four to six percent of
the garments have stains that should have been removed prior to
pressing. How can this be?
One of the biggest problems in production
is that we are constantly pushing the work through the plant.
Under these conditions, the easiest thing to overlook or let
slip by is the inspection step. The Drycleaner/Spotter pushes
the work through and “assumes” someone else will
see the stain somewhere down the line. Sometimes the stains are
caught by the pressers and, sometimes, at final inspection.
However, too often the stains are caught by the disappointed
customer!
The mistaken idea here is that the
employee thinks that it is more important to keep the garments
moving than it is to take the time to inspect them before
pressing.
Why is it that we never have enough time
to do things right, but we always have enough time to do things
over?
The customers drive the input factors in
this industry. You, the drycleaner, cannot control who drops
what off to be cleaned on any given day. This lack of control
leaves many feeling powerless over their business, especially
when things are slow. When business picks up and you get buried
in work, the whole process can become overwhelming.
Because you cannot control the amount of
incoming work, you must control how you schedule the workflow
and your employees’ hours. You must schedule the
marking-in of garments to ensure that the Drycleaner/Spotter
does not run out of work. Next, you must schedule the
DC/Spotter’s hours to ensure that the DC Pressers never
run out of work. The biggest waste of money in many plants is
idle production labor.
Goals for 2002
Make these your operational goals for 2002:
1. Reduce re-work by properly
inspecting all garments after they are cleaned.
2. Schedule the hours that your
employees start and finish work.
3. Establish production standards for
every operation (more info is available on-line at www.bizbuilderonline.com; click on “library” and put in
keyword “standards”).
4. Measure the productivity of your
employees every day.
5. Inspect every garment before
bagging.
6. Review all redo’s returned
by customers to determine where the system failed.
I want to wish you all a very happy,
healthy and prosperous New Year! I look forward to meeting many
of you in the new year and I hope that if I’m in your
area, you’ll come out to say “hello.”
I will be presenting my first management
seminar for 2002 in Baton Rouge, LA, on Saturday, March 9 at
the Sheraton/Argosy Casino Convention Center. Hope to see you
there!
Alan Robson is a private consultant
dealing with the specialized needs of the drycleaning industry.
For more information, contact him by telephone at (508)
753-6619 or send e-mail to him at: alan@bizbuilderonline.com or visit the Biz Builder web site: www.bizbuilderonline.com.
